Sarah A. Hoyt is a writer.  I enjoy her column, this line in particular:
“Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
It’s not only a clever riff on Arthur C. Clarke, it also explains so much about Democrats today.  It’s too hard to tell if they’re stupid or evil and doesn’t matter anyway.  Both evil AND stupidity must be resisted.

The one tends to hold the door for the other.

Kelly Moller – who defeated the competent and useful Randy Jessup in the  Metro Massacre last fall – is on a committee that’s in charge of writing and debating laws setting statewide policy.

And she just doesn’t liiiiiiike having to deal with all those pesky peasants:

Know thy place, knave.

Trashing transparency.   Jamming down taxes.  Telling all you peasants to shut up and get in line.

This is today’s DFL.

…Is Babylon Bee satire, or is it the best straight news source in America?

Planned Parenthood – bloodthirsty ghouls. Emphasis added:

In 2017, a Planned Parenthood client came forward to share her story of wanting an abortion at 22-weeks and seeking that procedure from Planned Parenthood. The abortionists at the clinic walked her through the procedure and stated if they were “to proceed with the abortion and the baby was to come out still alive and active, most likely we would break the baby’s neck.”
This practice carried out by Planned Parenthood abortionists in Minnesota directly violates the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, that states if the baby “breathes or has a beating heart” regardless of “whether the umbilical cord has been cut” or if birth occurred by “induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.”
The Planned Parenthood client who came forward engaged in a two-day abortion procedure. On the second day, she had a change of heart and decided she wanted to keep her baby and continue her pregnancy. She expressed how insistent the abortionists were on continuing the abortion and felt “as if they were trying to sell me this abortion.” She finally convinced them to let her keep her baby and now has a happy and healthy child.

I try to keep calm and collected about this kind of thing, but my disgust is starting to grow claws.

The party of James Hodgkinson, of “Anti”-Fa, of Eric “Nuke The Gun Owners” Swalwell, of “Fight in the Streets” (VP candidate Tim Kaine and Loretta Lynch ) and demands for military coups (Sarah Silverman) and punching teenage girls (Woody Kaine) and grownup girls (Keith “Thumper” Ellison) and fantasies (Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Bow Wow) and dramatizations (Kathy Griffin) and internal media threads about killing Republicans, of multiple dramatic and “comedic” productions featuring the violent deaths of Republicans (including Dubya and The Donald), of co-opting the same of a movement that killed “the enemy” with guns and bombs and molotov cocktails (“The #Resistance“) and generalized inchoate rage (Amy “Dearest” Klobuchar) and countless threats against everyone from the Covington Kids to yours truly and my friends, and a generalized climate of violent bigotry and hatred, not to mention a two year long tantrum over losing an election to which they felt entitled…

…is upset that Representative Cal Bahr, in a bit of rhetorical flourish, urged a group of people who are, statistically speaking, 42 times less likely to commit ANY violent crime than the general public to “run over” and “stomp on”…

…a couple of pieces of really stupid legislation.

Yeah, let’s call it even.

#Bergs7thLaw

Is Babylon Bee a parody site? Or the best news site in America?

Why choose?

Not-especially-seemly confession; I’ve never been to a strip club.

But there are a few photos circulating from thirty years ago that, I suspect, a few lefty social media gerbils would flog their nether bits into frenzies of microturgidity if they could find ’em; I’m talking with a couple of strippers in a bar.

We’re all working in the bar (including them – clothed. It was a promotion for the sleazy DJ service I worked for). And they were friends of mine; we shared a stretch of our lives working in bars entertaining drunks in widely varying ways.

I thought about that when I saw an article recently about a Buzzfeed piece in which the “writer” “slut-shamed” Tucker Carlson for sharing a friendly (literally, nothing more) moment with a “Sex Worker” at the funeral of a mutual friend. It was a display of the sort of moral cretinousness that today’s left is perfecting.

And the responses have been interesting; Big Leftymedia tittered like a bunch of fourth-graders (or perhaps fourth-graders titter like “liberal” “journalists”); in the meantime, the conservative commentary site “The Federalist” gave the woman a forum:

That it was made an issue speaks to the fact that a progressive journalist believed that a man to whom she has ascribed a belief system would be shamed by being in this photo. She attempted to call out his hypocrisy, as journalists so often do. But the hypocrisy didn’t exist. Moreover, if Aurthur, as a good leftist, has no problem with sex work then why would she have an issue with someone else not being troubled by it either?
Christina Parreira, the sex worker featured in the photo, found a place to speak her truth in The Federalist, a conservative outlet long derided by the progressive left for mostly vacuous reasons. The fact that a sex worker had to set the record straight in The Federalist about a Twitter-based kink shaming hoax speaks to the change that has been happening throughout our media. Outlets that were once considered to be beacons of free expression are now more prudish and censorious than the outlets they critique.

Their only real morality is “tear down the ‘opposition'”.

DFL operative William Davis last fall: “Send Republicans to the guillotines when we win the election”.

Davis today:

October: "Let's haul Republicans to the guillotines!"

February: "Cal Bahr is a meeeaaaaaanie!"#NARNShow#BergsSeventhLaw https://t.co/LmA4R7EWPH

— Mitch Berg (@mitchpberg) February 25, 2019

Background: At the Gun Rights rally last Saturday, Rep. Cal Bahr told the crowd we needed to “Stomp” gun control bills, and the idea that oppressing the law-abiding is a good plan to dela with crime.

Was Bahr’s rhetoric (for which he has since apologized and clarified) mprudent? Perhaps.

Is Davis’ self-righteous bleating hilarious?

It’s Berg’s Seventh Law. It’s always hilarious.

About 1,000 of my closest friends turned out for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus’ “2019 Rally To Protect The 2nd Amendment” on Saturday.

Bear in mind – the weather on Saturday was inclement at best. I think the good guys expected half this number for turnout.

Compare this to “Protect” Minnesota’s turnout on a beautiful day a few weeks back:

The comparison is inescapable – Second Amendment Civil Rights activists are real people, motivated by their real passion for securing civil liberty for all Americans; gun control activists are uninformed dupes of plutocrats who seek to enslave Real Americans.

Go ahead, Ryan Winkler. Bring those bills to the floor. I dare you.

How do climate proponents of anthropomorphic global warming reconcile these articles: this article , and this one .
20 years ago, climate scientists confidently assured me that as the planet warmed, snowfall would cease.  I assume their assurance was based on some scientific model linking CO2 to increasing temperatures to melting polar ice, etc.  But we just had a record snowfall even as CO1 readings and global temperatures continue to rise.  Does that mean there’s a flaw in the model?
This is a serious question, because at the moment, it looks as if the model has failed as a predictor and that brings into question the value of the AGW theory in general.
Joe Doakes

You’re wrong, because shut up .

Phony “survivors” making up stories about Brett Kavanaugh: heroes.

Survivor of one of the most harrowing rapes – no, read the account, there’s no euphemizing it – who calls BS on Big Media’s growing uselessness to preserving democracy?

Not so much.

UPDATES – hearing postponed. More at the bottom of the article.

At Valley View Middle School in Edina.

Why would the DFL-controlled House decide to hold its hearings

• 15 miles from the Capitol
• in an auditorium that seats far fewer people than the combined House hearing rooms can seat,
• to turn the location of the hearing itself into a propaganda point (even though school violence is down sharply in the last 25 years)
• to make it harder for citizens to participate (the capacity of the auditorium is far less than that of the various hearing rooms at the state capitol)
• to kill transparency; the existing hearing rooms allow the hearings to be broadcast, so the people statewide can see the DFL in all its skullduggerous pettifogging glory
• If you’re a gun owner who uses public transit? Unless you live within a mile or so of the school, it’s 2-3 transfers to get there.
• Worst of all, it creates a “felony trap” for law-abiding citizens wanting to attend the hearings

Oh, yeah – and it seems more than likely that the Edina school board is playing games, effectively barring just sent in groups from using public space in which to stage dissenting demonstrations.

This was always going to be one of those sessions where we need law-abiding gun owners to step up and show the weasels in the DFL who’s boss.

This time, more than most: the good guys are going to have to:

1. Protest against the use of the public hearing process for propaganda purposes
2. Protest against the useless and oppressive bills themselves.

In the meantime, the good guys need to melt down Rep. Mariani’s phone line (651-296-9714) and blow up his inbox (rep.carlos.mariani@house.gov) with respectful, thoughtful, considered messages indicating that the People of Minnesota would really like hearings to be about policy, not DFL propaganda.

Either way – whether the hearings are at the Capitol or at Valley View, if you could be rarin’ to go on Wednesday, let’s all make an evening of it, OK? 

UPDATE: Since Valley View Middle School is in fact a school, carry is illegal under Minnesota law…

…unless you get permission from the Superintendent per Minnesota statute.

So send the Superintendent, and Valley View’s principal, a request to honor your permit. The template is right here. It should download an MS Word file. Change the return address and signature line to your own, and send it to the two officials (email address provided in the template).

Then share your responses in the comment section.

DIVERSITY ALERT: The school would seem to have been chosen to mirror the utter Caucasianity of Minnesota’s gun grabber cult:

UPDATE + BIG WIN! – The “hearing” has been postponed and will apparently be moved.

Where? Well, hopefully the Capitol. But we’ll see.

Anyway – the good guys won this skirmish; apparently Rep. Mariani’s inbox was already gushing smoke when he walked in this morning (yes, I made that up, but you gotta admit it’s a wonderful image, right?), and the Edina Schools got so many permission requests they’ve worn out the Control+V keys on several office keyboards.

Well done, Real Americans.

Get ready for the next go-’round.

Rep. Mariani (rep.carlos.mariani@house.mn),

I am a Saint Paul resident.  I am writing to protest the hijacking of the hearing process to serve as a DFL propaganda event.  

Putting the hearings on the Red Flag Gun Confiscation and Universal Registration bills at Valley View Middle School next week is exploitive, emotionally manipulative, and worst of all creates a potential felony trap for law-abiding citizens wishing to attend the hearings.   

It’s also un-transparent – there is far less space for spectators, and the hearings can’t be broadcast on the House video stream.  

This move is manipulative and deeply undemocratic, and I really hope you will reconsider.  

Mitch Berg
Saint Paul

Reading about MNLARS – the state’s drivers license, registration and titling system – is making me nostalgic.

Back in 1996-97, I worked for a company that was engaged to do the engineering for a big, extremely well-funded startup in Palo Alto, run by a former salesman from IBM. The company’s business model: pay people to read spam. The theory was, people would set up accounts, and then get a little bit of the ad buy money for clicking on ads, and links in spam emails.

Catering to greed, of course, is never a bad business model. But by the time I left the company, we were figuring that someone clicking on six ads a minute, 8 hours a day, might make $6-8.

I wound up leaving – and was delighted to read in PC Magazine that the project had made their “Ten Dumbest Ideas of 2007” poll. By this time, I the company had folded, taking $30 million in investor funding with it (along with, I was less delighted to learn, the company that I’d worked for).

Remember when $30 million on a bad idea seemed like a lot of money?

If that’d been a government project…

Oh, wait.

The Minnesota taxpayer has spent close to $100 million on the MNLARS system – half up front, leading to a spectacular failure, and half for a “fix” that failed even worse.

And now Governor Walz wants to double down on the failure:

Walz released a budget this week that includes $94 million through 2021 to finish the system known as MNLARS, operate it for two years, hire staff, and reimburse deputy registrars who took a financial hit from the botched 2017 rollout. That’s on top of $15.7 million in stopgap funding that Walz was already seeking to get the system through June 30.

To pay for some of the costs, Walz has proposed a $2 fee every time a driver makes a vehicle license, tab or title transaction.

Via Fox9

Fearless prediction; we’ll end up spending $400 million, and end up doing the whole thing in Google Drive spreadsheets.

Rep. Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez may be this year’s socialist flavor of the month, a would-be disruptor of American politics.

But in another very important way, she seems to be very much business-as-usual; there’s evidence that, like (it seems) most Democrats from New York City, she’s corrupt as the day is long.

Almost too hard to pick a single pullquote from this long, laboriously researched piece. You should read it all.

But here’s an important bit:

Regardless of whether or not [Ocasio Cortez’ boyfriend Riley] Roberts was officially AOC’s spouse [at the time her campaign staff showed him on salary], it seems probable [Ocasio Cortez’ benefactor, strategist and now chief of staff Saikat] Chakrabarti was reimbursing her for her campaign expenses off-books. Brand New Congress PAC simply served as a pass-through to do so.
When AOC won, she then hired Chakrabarti, her strategist/patron, as her Chief of Staff. Taking money from a rich guy, trying to hide it by passing it through a PAC, and then giving her benefactor a government job.
That’s definitely unethical and potentially illegal. Chakrabarti may have made an illegal campaign contribution in excess of federal limits. Regardless, it raises questions about Chakrabarti’s hiring as AOC’s Chief of Staff after her election. Maybe add that to your next lightning round, Congresswoman.

From Medium

Read the whole thing.

And meet the new swamp-dweller. Same as the old swamp-dweller.

So if wrote a piece about a fact-checking site “checking facts” on a satirical story, you’d either think that the “Fact Check” site was the one being satirical, or that the satire site had gone just a tad over the top.

Neither is apparently the case in this story, in which Snopes “fact checks” Babylon Bee – which, in its own way may be America’s finest news source today, if you think about it – and a “story” it did about Jussie Smollett getting a job at CNN. Babylon Bee was (so far) being satirical, and Snopes was not.

Oh, yeah – did I say the Bee was likely America’s most reliable source of news? I’m being a little less satirical than they are:

Jussie Smollett Offered Job At CNN After Fabricating News Story Out Of Thin Airhttps://t.co/RNCG1r6ShA pic.twitter.com/Efsd5WEOMa

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 18, 2019

They may do news better than the Big Three, these days.

Nick Sandmann and the other Covington Kids, justifiably upset after malicious editing left them the targets of the purple-faced rage of America’s virtue-signaling lynch mob, are suing the WaPo for $250 million.

The lawsuit claims The Post “ignored the truth” about the incident and says the paper “falsely accused Nicholas of … ‘accost[ing]’ Phillips by ‘suddenly swarm[ing]’ him in a ‘threaten[ing]’ and ‘physically intimidat[ing]’ manner … ‘block[ing]’ Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips ‘to retreat,’ ‘taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,’ [and] chanting, ‘Build that wall,’ ‘Trump2020,’ or ‘Go back to Africa,’ and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct. …”Sandmann’s attorneys accuse The Post of publishing seven “false and defamatory” articles about the incident between Jan. 19 and 21 and claim the paper “knew and intended that its false and defamatory accusations would be republished by others, including media outlets and others on social media.”

Fox News, 2/19

Defamation cases are hard to win – justifiably so. We don’t want a system like the UK, where the famous and well-connected can shut up all criticism.

On the other hand, given the intensity of Big Media’s drive to “other” everyone who didn’t vote for Hillary, I’m wondering if there’s a legal theory that’d support a class action defamation suit?

If you’re a Minnesota 2nd Amendment supporter, it’s go time.

The Gun Owners Caucus is holding the “2019 Rally To Protect The Second Amendment” at the Capitol Rotunda on Saturday morning.

Event starts at 11. Doors open at 10.

If we could get over a thousand people there, it’d send a very powerful message to the DFL in the House.

I’ll be there. I’ll be broadcasting a NARN episode from the last rally, in April – a fairly evergreen one about the imperative for citizens to support the right to keep and bear arms along with all the others.

Easy.

1. Be a loser living in their mom’s basement, or a preacher of some obscure separatist sect back in some holler in the Appalachians, or to pick a current example, the “editor” of a newspaper with a circulation roughly that of this blog’s daily readership. Then…
2. Express some form of sympathy for the Klan, or the Nazis, or any other white supremacist group
3. Watch the media beat a path to your door.

The media is, of course, trying to “de-normalize” opposition to the Big Left – to create the impression that the people #TheResistance is resisting really are the deplorables really are the cartoons Obama and Hillary described.

Our media have to crawl way up into “the woodwork” to create the impression that racists are “coming out of the woodwork”.

But let’s be fair – it is more honest than the Southern Poverty Law Center’s approach, which is to just lie about it.

I don’t know about you – but these days, when a accusation of a “hate crime” gets massive, immediate coverage, I’ve started to assume it’s a hoax until proven otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong – hate crimes exist. But the more publicity the unproven allegations get, and the more lurid the charges against someone in a MAGA cap, the more likely it seems the whole story turns out to have all the substance and integrity or a Ryan Winkler presentation on Black History Month.

Jussie Who?:Three weeks ago, I had not heard of Jussie Smollett. I’ve never had occasion to watch Empire, and I doubt I ever will.

But when I heard the story of the “Hate Crime” that reached out and, per his story, caught him a few weeks ago, nothing, even to my rather cursory listening, seemed to add up.

Kyle Smith – not a cop, but rather a writer at National Review – noticed the same things, and has 27 questions for the “journalists” who presumed Smollett’s story – of “MAGA”-screaming rednecks who attacked him without really attacking him – was unassailably true.

8 . How likely do you think it is that attackers would shout, “This is MAGA country” in Chicago, a place that no one thinks is MAGA country?

There are 26 more – the sort of thing “journalists”, ostensibly being the curious sort, should have asked.

13. Don’t you think it strange that his attackers fled without much harming Smollett or robbing him?

14. Related to (13), did it not occur to you that the whole alleged attack looked a bit like the criminal equivalent of a press release, meant to send a message rather than accomplish anything?

15. If you were beaten up, would you somehow remember to pick up your Subway purchase afterward?

Goalposts Moved: Over the weekend, as Smollett’s story began to collapse, the narrative changed; Smollett’s actions weren’t themselves a publicity “hate crime” against deplorables; they were “starting a conversation”:

Don’t let anyone say this latest hate crime hoax was okay because it “started a conversation.”

This episode SHOULD start a conversation – about the outright bigotry of the media and those who hate Trump and his supporters so much they will do things like this.

— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) February 17, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I think Jussie Smollett, and especially all the #Resitance media sycophants who parroted the story because, if you hate the MAGAs, it’s just too good to fact-check, just made life a lot harder for people who actually do wind up on the wrong side of bigotry.

Other than deplorables, obviously.

One of the best-known, and certainly longest-running, series in the history of this blog was my 130 part series of 20th anniversaries of events between deciding to move to the Twin CIties in 1985, and my oldest child’s birth in 1991. The series took (doy) six years to write.

One of the characters that popped up was a roommate I had at the time. I gave him a pseudonym (as I did with a couple of the people that were, er, on the “colorful” side) – “Wyatt“. He had a thing for the ladies, was addicted to pretty much everything to which one could be addicted (and dealt in some of it vocationally), He gave off certain signs of mental illness, although I was pretty bad at noticing that kind of thing back then. Our roomate situation ended one night in 1988, when he shot up the house we rented in what I had ascribed to a cocaine-fueled frenzy.

I’ve neither talked with nor heard from “Wyatt” for over 30 years. I will confess, I googled him about ten years ago, and found from a few news stories – a break-in at a liquor store, a trial and sentence – that showed that his habits were keeping him in just as much trouble as they did when I knew him.

I also knew he had a father – a fairly wealthy man, a former Navy frogman who had done well in, I believe, real estate or insurance or something like that – and a mother. And I knew his family loved him, and spent a lot of money and, I suspect, a lot more effort and emotional energy, trying to get him on the right track – including sending him to treatment in Minnesota, which of course led him across my path in 1987.

And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.

A bit of curious googling over the weekend brought it all back.

“Wyatt” had a real name. And he died in 2010 – ironically, not long after his departure from the series. Tragically, but not in the least bit surprisingly, he died of mixing drugs and booze.

And I’m going to admit – while my “Wyatt” tales in “Twenty Years Ago Today” were true down to the last comma and semicolon, they painted as one-dimensional a picture of him as one might expect someone who, twenty years later, was still kicking himself for letting that kind of dysfunction into his life, and the consequences it brought.

The article – featuring his parents, who have stayed involved in trying to help the mentally ill over the years – brings a human aspect to “Wyatt” – Wyeth – that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge when I wrote the series, over a decade ago.

My very belated condolences to everyone involved.

From Twitter yesterday:

“Conservatives pounce on failed attempt to smear conservatives” are the best conservatives pounce stories.

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) February 17, 2019

I’m not sure about you, but it’s almost gotten too easy.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is building a snow wall around his property.

Before he can close the last gap along the sidewalk, MyLyssa Silberman – reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats – pulls up in a Subaru Outback.

SILBERMAN: [stepping out of the car]Merg!

BERG: Er…hi, MyLyssa. What’s up?

SILBERMAN: I’m doing a series on the purveyors of brisk, quippy rhetorical memes and their use in disseminating “fake news”.

BERG: Of course you are.

SILBERMAN: If I may. In the past, you have referred to the new municipal trash collection systems in cities like Bloomington, Saint Paul and other cities as [riffles through notes] “Soviet-style trash collection”. Also [squinting] “East German”, “Tony Soprano-Style”, “Cuban” and…

BERG: North Korean.

SILBERMAN: Here in my notebook it says “North Korean”.

BERG: Yep.

SILBERMAN: Are these racist references against Russians, Germans, Sicilians, Latinos and Asians? And how are they affected by climate change?

BERG: No, and not at all.

SILBERMAN: OK, we’ll come back to that. But what do those terms mean?

BERG: It’s a reference to the fact that in countries that try to repeal the free market – among them most “socialist” nations – there is no incentive to serve customers better. In planned, marketless economies, all goods and services are essentially rationed, and there’s no impetus to provide a good or service better, more efficiently, or even more cheerfully than anyone else, since there’s no upside to it; you get paid the same whether you’re a jerk or an Employee of the Month.

SILBERMAN: OK, but how does this relate to trash collection in the Twin Cities? We haven’t suspended the free market.

BERG: Well, we’re going to need a price check on that statement. Saint Paulites are complaining about the service they’re getting from the hauler their city so graciously selected for them:

Beginning Jan. 30, [Waste Management, the hauler allocated to a large part of the East Side by the City Council’s “Sopranos”-style division of the city’s turf] skipped pickups on her street, Cottage Avenue East, for three weeks in a row. Rather than complete full collection Wednesday, drivers exited their vehicles to take pictures of overflowing trash carts and lids that couldn’t fully close. Some they emptied. Some they didn’t.
Now, residents are bracing for financial penalties.
“They drove through the alley yesterday, right past all the garbage cans that were out and not covered with or buried in snow, and only emptied two cans,” said Riggs on Thursday in an email to Ward 6 City Council member Kassim Busuri’s office. “Since that seems to be one of many excuses they use, yes, the lids are not closed, which is another thing they will charge us extra for. According to St. Paul policy, they must close. Otherwise it is $3

BERG: By the way, MyLyssa – my old trash collector would only upcharge me for an over-full container if a good chunk of the bag was visible. The new haulers are gloriously Minnesota passive-aggressive about it, and the customer service is atrocious, even in other neighborhoods.

Who picked up your trash, by the way?

SILBERMAN: I live in a condo downtown, so my trash just goes away.

BERG: Right. Continuing:

Busuri said he’s more than just sympathetic. He’s in the same boat.
“I’ve had the same problem myself,” Busuri said, “where the trash was not picked up for going on three weeks. It bothers me to see a garbage hauler not fulfilling their obligation in the contract. There’s a section in the contract where we can charge the haulers for every collection they miss. I’m looking into that

SILBERMAN: See! They’ll fix it!

BERG: Sure. The city council will cross the actions of a previous city council, most of whom have gone on to positions of bureaucratic power that .can be used against them.

SILBERMAN: What do you mean?

BERG: OK, so imagine you were to park in Teri Gross’s parking spot…

SILBERMAN: That would be really bad.

BERG: See?

SILBERMAN: No.

BERG: It’ll never get fixed. There’s no market imperative to do anything, and plenty of bureaucratic imperatives not to.

SILBERMAN: So you’re saying you’re transphobic.

BERG: Are you by some chance working on getting a PR job with the city?

And SCENE

In the latest Bar Association magazine, there’s an article calling on lawyers to provide more free legal work to help society, especially people who have been neglected or underrepresented or oppressed. 
In the same magazine, there’s an article telling lawyers: “Misgendering a person – such as referring to someone as “sir” or “she” when they are not – is an act of gender violence.
So I should volunteer to help someone who will be offended by my help?  Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if I did nothing? 

Big Left these days reminds me of a cop who gives out contradictory orders, to assure the person they’re yelling at does something they can arrest them for.

Price hikes brought about by New York City’s new $15 minimum wage are causing some consumer heartburn.

Unexpectedly:

Some New Yorkers are displeased with one of the more predictable outcomes of a $15 minimum wage—restaurants all over the city are raising their prices, according to the New York Post.

The city’s minimum wage went up to $15 from $13 or $13.50 at the beginning of 2019, boosting the paychecks for numerous lower-wage workers.
Those who rely on restaurants regularly for their daily lunches, however, aren’t as happy.
“It’s obnoxious—kind of a slap in the face,” Starbucks patron Edward Beck told the Post. “Another increase, and I won’t come back.”
Restaurants are raising prices to adjust for the higher salaries they must pay workers. But, they’re increasingly worried about discouraging customers with too-high prices.
“[Restaurants] feel they’re getting to a point where the customer might reject the higher prices, choose a different way to eat out, or eat their own food,” said Melissa Fleischut, president and CEO of the New York State Restaurant Association.

“But…but, it’s from The Blaze! Your source has a point of view, and therefore is invalid!”

The same precise story is behind the lines of this story from that noted conservative tool, the Star Tribune, from last year; a local restaurant mainstay is losing customers, price point and restaurant jobs due in large part to all that social justice they’re paying for.